Comments from the bleachers by somebody who's been some places and done some things and cares enough to try and get a handle on things.

Wednesday, October 03, 2012

LIBERAL FASCISM 8

I continue this mini-series on Jonah Goldberg’s 2007
book Liberal Fascism.* (In these
Posts, Jonah Goldberg will be shortened to ‘JG’.)

Having given an overview of JG’s thoughts, in this
Post I’d like to select some particular points of interest. In several
subsequent Posts I’ll deal with some of the numerous and eye-opening quotations
from historical figures in American and/or socialist and Progressive history,
from the young Woodrow Wilson up through LBJ.

Equally ominously, the Progressives (as all totalitarian
variants) “saw the home as the front line in the war to transform men into
compliant social organs”. (p.88) (Note that JG uses the generic “men” to refer
to all Citizens.)

Consequently, “an archipelago of agencies,
commissions and bureaus sprang up overnight to
take the place of the … influences of the family”. (p.88) [italics mine]

Further, “the home could no longer be seen as an
island, separate and sovereign from the rest of society.” (p.88)

To this end, John Dewey – the noted educational
thinker and Progressive – “helped create kindergartens in America for precisely
this purpose: to shape the apples before they fell from the tree – while at the
other end of the educational process stood reformers like Woodrow Wilson, who
summarized the progressive attitude perfectly when, as president of Princeton,
he told an audience, ‘Our problem is not merely to help the students adjust
themselves to world life … [but] to make
them as unlike their fathers as we can’”. (p.88) [italics mine]

I invite you to give deep and thoughtful
consideration to this agenda. And not only for whatever information it conveys
about the now-distant very early 20th century of first-wave
Progressivism, but also for the very recent and still-working third-wave Progressivism
of the Identity Politics and Culture and Gender wars embraced by the Beltway
after 1972. (Recalling as well Bismarck’s acutely apt phrases Kulturkampf (culture war) and Gleichschaltung (total alignment of all
aspects of society and culture.)

The foundational presumption of the Progressive
hostility to the Family (seen also in Lenin and Mussolini; and also in Hitler,
who – however – paid deep lip-service to the volkisch Family even as he ensured that not only neighbors but even
relatives and children would feel
bound to report to the Gestapo about
any un-Correct conversation or ideas that they overheard among parents and relatives)
is that the Family represents a counter-influence to government-embraced
Progressive attitudes and objectives, and a counter-influence to the
Progressive Stance generally.

(And here you can see where the Catholic Church,
with its abiding focus and insistence on the absolutely vital human necessity
of the Family for genuine individual human development, was almost guaranteed
to become the target of any Progressive (or other total-izing variant)
government’s hostility.)

If thus Progressivism’s totalizing approach – so hugely
antithetical to any traditional Western or American concept of Family’s role in
the social ethos and to the American Framing and Founding concept of a limited Constitutional
government’s role – was to succeed, the Family had to be ‘aligned’ with the
Progressive agenda a) so that the government would not have to tolerate in its
midst and at the very heart of culture and society any alternative and
oppositional influences and so that b) the next generations could be
Progressively shaped in their most impressionable (and vulnerable) years.

Progressivism contains – and has always contained –
at its core some core presumptions that are stunningly antithetical to the
American ethos and – I would say – to the fundamental structures of human
society and the process of raising, shaping, forming, and socializing its young.
And if you consider the now-established Flattening and Mono-planar Progressive/’liberal’
secularism, then it becomes clear that not only practically but metaphysically
that secularism seeks to Shape the young.

Nor – I would say – can We accept blandly and
blithely and without question Hillary Clinton’s assertion that “it takes a
village” to raise children. This sly gambit sought simultaneously to a) justify
radical-feminist efforts (embraced by the Beltway) to ‘deconstruct’ the Family
in order to carve out non-maternal roles for women while b) seeming to support
a more ‘tradition-friendly’ emphasis on ‘community’ and masquerading thus as a
somewhat ‘conservative’ and ‘traditional’ approach which, in truth, it most
certainly was not.

Indeed, it should be clear how very much third-wave
Progressivism, so deeply and viscerally enmeshed with radical-feminist agendas,
has slyly used ‘the children’ as a crowbar to break apart the vital and
heretofore sacred space of the Family in order to further its agendas and
objectives.

Domestic violence initiatives – claiming to be
motivated solely by a concern to stop ‘violence’ – have resulted in draconian
and totalizing legislation which itself requires twisting American and Western legal
first-principles and jurisprudence into pretzels. To say this is not to ‘support
violence’ but simply to point out – as should have been strongly pointed out
before such initiatives were erected into law and jurispraxis – that there are
monstrously lethal consequences built-into them and that those consequences
were pretty much guaranteed to actualize themselves. As they have.

In the same way, the third-wave, post-1972
Progressive/’liberal’ sex-offense initiatives of the 1990s have done precisely
the same thing, to the extent of creating – in the internet age – electronic ‘registries’
of Citizens (already ‘convicted’ according to the aforesaid deformed and
deranged new legal practices and concepts) in precisely the same way that
police-state totalitarianism (the Cheka,
OGPU, NKVD, KGB, Gestapo and Stasi – to name but the most familiar)
kept card-files of this and that category of Citizen for easy tagging and
reference. Long before 9/11 and the subsequent anti-constitutional ‘national
security’ impositions under Bush-Cheney, these developments should have been recognized
as the alarming symptoms they were.

And, on that other end of the education process, high-schools
and universities are no longer in the business of educating into the knowledge and critical thinking skills essential
to a competent Citizenry. Why should they? Since according to Correct
Progressive/’liberal’ assessment, a) all of the ‘history’ is tainted with this
and that variation on the themes of dominance, hierarchy, patriarchy,
oppression, hegemony and marginalization – and thus the past is useful merely
for fishing around to get this or that example of same.

And b) because all that the New Order Citizen really
requires is socialization into the
Correct mindsets and practices that have always been the objective of the
Progressive and ‘liberal’ totalizing urge to re-make and re-create and re-form
and re-shape and re-Shape everybody anyway. The last thing the New Order
Citizen needs to do is to think critically: the elites and the Correct dogma
has already done the thinking; and – if I may – ‘there need be no further
education in the New Order for a thousand years’ (paraphrasing the hyper-confident
totalizing stylings of that former head of the Third Reich).

And during this transitional phase there need only
be the ability – and predisposition – to come up with historical or conceptual ‘proof-texts’
that demonstrate the pure wisdom of the New Order and the utter depravity of
anything and everything that had gone before. (With a savage irony, this ‘proof-text’
mentality is so very similar to American Protestant religious fundamentalism,
itself raised up by the Reagan-era political elites as an (equally-lethal) counterforce
to the Progressive/’liberal’ fundamentalism of the totalizing cadres and elites
of the New Left that the Democrats had embraced a decade before.)

Meanwhile, generations of children have now grown up
without the stability and security and guidance of mature adults (who, now, are
themselves the chronologically-grown under-developed ‘children’ of not long
ago). And these generations now demonstrate all of the predictable
developmental and maturational derangements that might clearly have been
expected of such a toxic and treacherous gambit.

And these generations now not only lack the skills
necessary to sustain an adult life, but to execute the responsibilities of
competent Citizens who – in the Framing Vision – were to be the governors of
their government (and its remora-like expert-elites).

What is the interior world occupied by the average
youngster or young person today? I would say that it is not capacious. And that
in far too many instances it does not extend back in Time into the rich and
valuable traditions of American – and perhaps
even human – culture and experience and tradition. And that in far too many
instances it does not extend Upward into any Beyond, although a tendency-toward
such a Beyond has very demonstrably been an enduring characteristic of the
human species from its beginnings.

And that when it does extend in Space it does so
only shallowly, entranced and obsessed –
even if only by default because the youngster knows no better and has never
been taught any better – with the
surfaces and appearances and ephemera of a culture seeking to reduce them into
being merely consumers and not Citizens or even genuinely full human-beings.

And that that shallowness reflects an interior
shallowness and emptiness and un-Shapedness, an unripeness induced by the
dearth in their young lives of any education-into or example-of the higher
reaches of the human being, of the human Self.

And that thus such persons will not develop into
competent Citizens precisely because they have not been helped to develop into
genuinely ripe and mature human beings.

It might be cheeribly burbled – in the accents of
Antonio Gramsci – that once all these generations are sufficiently socialized
into accepting the New Order and their own ‘liberations’ as ‘normal’, then the
government can once again release to them the authority to have an actual
functioning say in their own governance. But human history does not support
such an optimistic outcome – indeed, just the opposite: the government will
continue to increasingly trail-boss the increasingly helpless (though Correctly
‘liberated’) herds.

Such progress.

And the Family and the educational institutions
continue to devolve into haphazard and ever-shifting foundations of sand. The Family
is whatever those who – for the moment – seek some connection wish it to be. The
University is now a consumer-oriented font of socializing Correctness, catering
to the whims of those it is supposed to be educating (on the presumption that
those who are students need to be educated) and offering as a return on its
(verrrry expensive) services merely a ‘ticket’ to glorious higher-employment
and all the liberation and fulfillment that goes with a well-paid job that will
enable them to consume and thus to reach human fulfillment.

But at this juncture, with the Beltway and its
Progressive/’liberal’ knowledge elites and pols of both Parties now having
allowed the national economy (and, indubitably its solvency) to slide beyond
the tipping-point, those generations are confronted with a future of
shifting-sand; because for decades and
with increasing intensity, only government cash – variously infused – has been
keeping those marvelous jobs and the Oz-like illusions of a vibrant robust and
growing ‘economy’ administered in the service of all the Correct Progressive/’liberal’
dogmas, going.

As the cash runs out, the illusions will
increasingly dissolve into thin air for all but a very very few at the very top
of the (once-again) Hobbesian and Social Darwinist ladder.

And how will an infantilized and un-educated and
unripe Citizenry – for so long treated as a ‘herd’ – respond? What does the
herd do when the trail-bosses themselves have led it into a box-canyon in a
blizzard?

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About Me

I'm trying to think my way through what's happening in the country and the world, and I want to share those ideas and see what other people think. I don't put a high priority on the rest of the usual blog stuff. I think it was one of Solzhenitsyn's characters, just back from Siberia, who feared that if he remembered his shirt size, he'd have to forget something that was important.